VIES service unavailable

If a check came back as “Could not check” for the VAT number, the registry did not answer. That is not a statement about the supplier — it is a statement about the service.

Why this happens so often

VIES is not one system. It is a thin front end that forwards each query to the tax authority of the country in question, and it publishes no uptime guarantee for either part. When Italy’s registry is down, Italian VAT numbers cannot be checked, even though VIES itself is fine.

This is normal, not exceptional. Some national registries have scheduled nightly maintenance windows, and several are noticeably less reliable outside business hours in their own time zone.

The dangerous part

VIES answers an unreachable member state with a negative result rather than an error — the response says “not valid” and puts the actual reason in a separate field. Tools that read only the first field will tell you a perfectly legitimate supplier’s VAT number is invalid.

This tool reads the reason field and reports “could not check” instead. If another service tells you a number is invalid and this one says the registry was unavailable, that discrepancy is why.

What to do

1. Try again in a few minutes. Most outages are short.
2. Try again during the country’s business hours if it keeps failing — national registries are more reliable then.
3. Do not treat it as a red flag. An unavailable registry says nothing about the supplier.
4. Check the other three results in the meantime. The IBAN checksum, sanctions screening and sending-domain checks do not depend on VIES and will have completed normally.

If you need a definitive answer today

For an EU number, the tax authority in the supplier’s own country can confirm registration directly. For a UK number, HMRC publishes its own checker. Both are slower than VIES but do not depend on it.

Whatever the registry says, confirm bank details by phone using a number you already had — not one from the invoice or email. Registry status and payment safety are different questions, and the second one is the one that costs money.